Exuberance is better than taste.
Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.
He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides.
What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!
There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream.
You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.
Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.
The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.
One mustn’t look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.
Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.
Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.
What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.
Mediocrity cherishes rules; as for me, I hate them; I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.
Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders.
One must laugh and weep, love, work, enjoy and suffer, in short vibrate as much as possible in all his being.
Reveal art; conceal the artist.